To Thomas Foy

Sir

I am content that for the present you shall mistake my character. I have written to you¹ in a manner which naturally gives truth to the opinion of my ‘warm friendship’ and ‘bitter enmity’ but in all my writing I had a higher object in view than the mere recovery of what you owe me; for this I care as little as perhaps any man of your acquaintance. I had reason to believe you dishonest, I now believe you to be unfortunate; did I still entertain the former opinion I should most assuredly act as I threatened to do in my first letter.² I accept your own account of yourself³ without asking for extraneous proof, inasmuch as your letters carry a kind of internal evidence of general correctness and truth. With regard to the saving of money, it is an art in which I never hope to excel, nor is it an art to which I attach much importance. My present situation⁴ is worth £200 a year and my employer is most anxious to retain my services at this salary; surely if a love of money actuated me I should not think of going to Germany⁵ where I shall pay for my living and instruction and in a pecuniary point of view return a pauper. This I do purely because I consider the line of duty lies that way and that I can render myself more useful to humanity by extending my knowledge and struggling to be a wiser and a better man.

I confess that the dislike which I have for some time felt for the philosophy of human character propounded by St. Simon, Fourier, and Owen⁶ has by your case been heightened into disgust. Theoretically I have long been aware of the impossibility of extracting a single noble impulse from such a creed, but when I find its practical results set forth bodily in you, when I find it sapping the foundations of morality and furnishing a ready excuse by which folly stifles the promptings of duty, I am constrained to cry ‘alas for the society where such principles are permitted to prevail’.

It would be unwise on my part to enter into any discussion with you – it would be productive of no good result. We should set out with the determination to differ and the more lengthy our argument the wider would be our divergence. I have waded through your present opinions myself though I never allowed them to interfere with the discharge of my engagements; these opinions constitute a phase through which almost every thinking mind in our present English society has had to pass. If you love truth and give yourself the trouble of seeking it up, I have not a shadow of doubt as to your abandonment of your present creed – in 9 cases out of 10 it finds laziness to be its best supporter.

It would be extremely easy to start a dozen questions which are incapable of solution according to your principles. It would be easy to confound you, but I don’t think that in doing so I should convince you just now. You consider me rather in the light of an antagonist than of a wellwisher, and this opinion would be sufficient to nullify any attempt that I could make. All I have to say is, that the doctrine you have propounded is rejected by the most philosophic minds in the world, that the great men of Germany have long since scouted it from their frontiers, that the profoundest thinkers in France and England are arrayed against it and that if you and I look within ourselves instead of looking at the ‘broad face of society’ we shall find ample data for its refutation without citing any external authority whatever.

I have no wish to prolong my remarks on this subject but if you think it worth your while to look into the matter again I shall be happy to recommend a book or two to your notice. One important item in the educational course of your parents you seem to slur over. They instilled into you, you say, a love of clean linen and for this you offer God thanks! On their behalf I would suggest that they taught you to love a clean conscience also, and that cleanliness in this respect is of infinitely greater importance than in the former. That you were so taught, although you appear to be culpably forgetful of the fact, my first connexion with you compels me to believe; and I would further hope that along with the anise and cumin of clean linen you will one day acknowledge the necessity of attending to the weightier matter.

Your remark concerning the Irish character is perhaps too true, though coming from your pen it sounds strange, but I cannot see the meaning of it; surely you don’t mean to insinuate that a clean shirt is a strange phenomenon to Tidmarsh. My personal knowledge of him would render such an insinuation foolish in the extreme to my ear, knowing as I do the refinement with which his family is able to surround him. This however it would be well to remember, that there is an infinite distance between a love of cleanliness and a cultivation of expensive habits at other peoples’ cost.

I have written this last sentence with reluctance as my wish is to avoid everything approaching to severity in this letter. With regard to paying me I wish it to be your own free act and shall therefore relinquish all intention of putting my threat⁷ into execution. My time here will be up on the 29 of September, but I shall probably remain a week longer. It is useless for me to tell you that my views of humanity have not been altogether formed in a college, that I have had as free and as extensive intercourse with the world as most young men, and that I have not looked upon it with an unobservant eye, all this you know already, but the amount of true knowledge to be drawn from such sources is at the utmost exceedingly meagre and worthless unless it be referred to a proper source. What you and I want is a knowledge of ourselves and not a knowledge of society. Let us look inward and see whether we cannot find underlying our own natures a great spiritual agency of which the world and its transactions are merely the scum.

Your friend | J. Tyndall

RI MS JT/2/13b/377-379

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